“What do you mean?”
Jack paused. “He’d been at the top of his class at the Royal Military Academy, one of the officers flagged for great things, perhaps a future army commander like Lord Kitchener, another Royal Engineer. But after the jungle, it was as if he did everything he could to avoid active service again. He’d been detailed to join the Khyber Field Force in Afghanistan, but instead was deployed in Rampa until the end. Then he left the Madras Sappers for secondment to the Indian Public Works Department, and after that went back to England to spend ten years teaching survey and editing the journal of the School of Military Engineering. These were respectable career moves for a Royal Engineers officer, but not for the ambitious soldier he had once been. Even after he returned to India as a garrison engineer in the 1890s he passed up on chances of campaigning. It was only at the end of his career that he was poised for active service again, on the Afghan frontier, twenty-five years after the Rampa Rebellion.”
“What about devotion to his family?” Rebecca said. “Couldn’t that have influenced him?”
Jack looked across at the faded photograph above the chest, showing a woman in a black dress holding a baby, her faced turned down to the child, indiscernible. He turned to Rebecca, nodding slowly. “Howard married young, straight out of the academy. They had a baby boy they adored. They lived in the military cantonment at Bangalore, headquarters of the Madras Sappers. The boy died while Howard was in the jungle several months after that day in August, struck down with convulsions one morning and buried that evening. It was weeks before Howard even knew. His wife never got over it, though they had three more children. Howard was utterly devoted to them, and told his children that he took up his job at the School of Military Engineering in England to get them away from the diseases that had killed their brother, and to be with them when they were at school.”
“He put family before career,” Aysha said. “Nothing wrong with that.”
Jack pursed his lips. “But there was more to it than that. Even after they’d grown up and he’d returned to India, he passed up chances. I’m convinced something happened on that day, 20 August 1879.”
“Sounds like something traumatized him,” Costas said.
“There’s one other thing.” Jack leaned over and opened the lower drawer of the chest. “You remember I mentioned an artifact I’d spoken about to Katya, when she and I saw her uncle’s reference to the Haljit Singh, the Tiger Hand? The one that nearly made her faint? This was it.” He took out a gleaming brass object almost the length of his forearm, and placed it carefully on the table between them. It was semi-cylindrical, and one end had been formed into the shape of a head, with protruding ears and a wide, leering mouth. “Howard brought this back from Rampa. This, the revolver, the little telescope and a few primitive arms captured from the rebels are just about the only artifacts that can be pinned to the campaign. Any guesses what this is?” Jack asked.
Hiebermeyer pushed up his glasses and leaned over, lifting it up gingerly to look underneath. “Well, it’s clearly a piece of armor, for the lower forearm and hand,” he asserted. “In the hollow under the head there’s a crossbar, and the mouth has a hole in it the size of a blade. My opinion is that this was once a gauntlet with an attached dagger or sword blade.”
“Full marks,” Jack said. “Not a thrusting blade, but a long, flexible blade, for sweeping cuts. It would have been awkward in unskilled hands, but with the gauntlet and the crossbar, rather than a conventional sword handle, the blade would have become like an extension of the arm. The swordsman could deliver a massive sweeping blow, easily enough to slice bodies in half with a razor-sharp blade. They were fearsome weapons, designed to be used from horseback.”
Rebecca touched the nose. “Those eyes look Chinese.”
“It’s called a pata, a gauntlet sword,” Jack said. “This one’s unique, and only a few other brass ones are known. Steel patas were used by the Marathas, the warrior-princes the British fought in southern and central India in the eighteenth century. But the British scholar who first studied patas thought they originated much earlier, among the Tatar ancestors of the Mongols in northern China. They could have come into India with the Mongol invaders, with Timur the Great in the fourteenth century, or Genghis Khan. Or one might have come much earlier by way of the Silk Route and then been copied. Most of the Indian patas of the seventeenth or eighteenth century are made of steel, and don’t have this decoration, the hammered-out head. My instinct is that this one is older, much older, possibly even of ancient date.”
“So what’s the connection?” Costas said.
“You asked about the god, the sacrificial god in the jungle,” Jack replied. “There were several, one of them a kind of earth goddess, another a god of war. But there’s only one shrine we know of, and that’s to Rama, the god who gave his name to the district. The legend of Prince Rama is wrapped up in Hindu mythology, but the version of Rama worshipped in the jungle was distinctive, possibly of very early origin. The shrine is mentioned in the records of the Rampa Rebellion because the rebel leader Chendrayya sacrificed two police constables there. It lies directly inland from the point where the Shamrock picked up Lieutenant Hamilton and his sappers after their foray in the jungle. And I believe it was where my ancestor found this pata. It was the only permanent structure in the jungle other than the huts of the villagers, and exactly where you’d expect such an unusual object to be stored, even venerated.”
“And you want to go and check it out,” Costas said.
“I need to see what he saw. To see if there’s anything still left.”
“Rama,” Hiebermeyer murmured, tapping his fingers on the table. “Rama”
“What is it?” Costas said.
“Just thinking aloud.”
Costas picked up the pata and stared at the face. “What is it? A god?”
Jack looked across. “It’s a tiger.”
“A tiger god?” Costas asked.
Jack slipped the pata over his hand, holding the crossbar. “Not tiger god,” he said, turning it slowly on his arm. “It’s what we always called it when I was growing up, what my grandfather told us to call it. He must have learned it from his grandfather, from John Howard. It’s what made Katya nearly faint when I described it to her. Tiger warrior.”
Early the next morning they stood on the bridge wing gazing out over the bows of the ship. Seaquest II had passed through the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka, navigating the treacherous channel at only a couple of knots speed. They had just watched the pilot disembark and power off in his speedboat. The northern tip of Sri Lanka was now receding off the starboard stern quarter, and the captain had reduced the alert level as they entered Indian territorial waters. The Breda gun turret had been lowered out of sight below the foredeck and the security team were stowing the two general purpose machine guns, which had been mounted on either side of the bridge. Ahead of them lay the Bay of Bengal, a shimmering expanse of water seemingly stretching out to infinity. The sea was dead calm, and it was as if they were motionless, mired in a haze of sea and sky with no visible horizon.
Jack sensed the whiff of excitement that had first drawn western explorers—his own ancestors—into these waters. The eastern sky seemed full of allure, and with the risks that made the draw that much more beguiling. Jack had been thinking about the Romans again. Here, two thousand years ago, they would have been on the cusp of the unknown, the place where the author of the Periplus had drawn the line between what he himself had seen, and the world beyond. Ahead lay places half-imagined, which the author knew only from the goods that were brought to him—silk, lapis lazuli, exotic spices and medicaments, carried by traders across great mountains and deserts to the sea. The traders he met would have told him little, and what they did tell might have been deliberately misleading, designed to put him off searching for the sources himself Yet their tales would have needed little exaggeration. The dangers were all too real, even today. Jack remembered the final lines of t
he Periplus. What lies beyond this region, because of extreme storms, immense cold and impenetrable terrain, and because of some divine power of the gods, has not been explored.
Costas came up beside him, and turned to speak. “Rebecca wants to come with us, Jack. She has three weeks’ more holiday from school.”
“She can come to the Roman site at Arikamedu, but not to the jungle. It’s bandit country out there. The place is a haven for Maoist terrorists. It’s heated up since the Indian government allowed foreign mining speculators into the jungle, and the Maoists have stirred up the tribal people.”
“Okay, you tell her.”
“She seems to listen to you, Uncle Costas.”
“She knows already.” Aysha was standing on the other side of Jack. “I told her.”
“Oh, thanks, Aysha.” Jack’s eye was suddenly caught by a spectacular image. The eastern shoreline of India had been visible a few miles off the port bow, but was now lit up by the morning sun as it rose above the haze to the east. It was an extraordinary sight, a thin line of beach and fringing palms glowing orange, as if a channel of fire were ripping up the shore toward the northern horizon. Jack thought of India in 1879, the year of the jungle rebellion. It was an India of Mughal opulence and colonial civility, yet there was another India, a darker place of desperation and cruelty, of starvation, of disease that took half the children and would kill a person within a day. Two decades before the Rampa Rebellion, India had been torn apart by the mutiny of the Indian troops of the East India Company’s Bengal Army, an orgy of barbarism and bloodshed. Three years before the rebellion, in 1876, a dreadful famine had settled in the south and killed millions. India seemed a place of temptation, yet a place where fickle mortality sharpened the senses, focused experience on the present. Jack remembered those last words in the diary of John Howard, written somewhere out here in the jungle beyond the line of coast that burned across the horizon. Lord help me. What had he seen?
A warm breeze wafted over them as Seaquest II picked up speed. Jack turned and went down the stairs to his cabin, leaving the door open. A few minutes later Rebecca came in flopping down on his foldout bed. “I’ve been reading a story you put by my bed, Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. It was published in 1888, and the book’s signed John Howard, Captain, R. E.”
“Go on,” Jack said.
“It’s about two British adventurers, former soldiers, who go north to Afghanistan in search of a fabled lost kingdom. They find it, and one of them becomes king, ruling like a god. But he accidentally cuts himself and the people see his blood and realize he’s mortal, and he comes to a sticky end. I also found James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, published in 1933. That’s about Shangri-la, somewhere in the mountains to the northeast of India, the fabled place where people were nearly immortal.”
“These are both modern legends,” Hiebermeyer said, walking into the cabin with Aysha, both carrying steaming mugs of coffee. Costas followed behind.
Rebecca shook her head determinedly, and pointed at a book on the desk. The cover showed an image of an exploding volcano at sea, superimposed on an underwater photograph of a rock-cut stairway leading to a dark entranceway surrounded by mysterious symbols. Across it was the single word Atlantis. “My mother sent a copy of that to me even before I knew you. That first chapter on the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Atlantis is also a modern legend, but there was a kernel of truth in it.”
“So you think we’re looking for a lost kingdom, for Shangri-la?” Hiebermeyer said dubiously.
Rebecca shook her head and pointed at a small pottery statue of a Chinese warrior used as a paperweight on Jack’s desk. “I’ve been thinking about that warrior.”
“Uh-oh,” Costas murmured. “I think we’re in for a bit of Howard lateral thinking.”
“You remember, Dad? You took me to the terracotta warriors exhibit at the British Museum in London the day after we flew in from New York.” She turned to Aysha, suddenly breathless with excitement. “It’s amazing. This guy, the First Emperor, had himself buried with everything, and I mean everything, under a mound the size of an Egyptian pyramid. They haven’t even excavated it yet, can you believe it? There’s only some ancient Chinese account of what it’s like. There’s a complete model of the world with mercury rivers, and even the heavens. The stars were jewels. And around the mound is what they’ve actually dug up, those warriors, all life-sized, thousands of them. It’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.”
Hiebermeyer began tapping his fingers. “What’s your point, Rebecca?”
“I think it’s all about immortality.”
“That’s what tombs are usually about,” Hiebermeyer said, still tapping. “Equipping people for the afterlife.”
“I don’t mean the afterlife, I mean immortality,” she said impatiently. “With the First Emperor, it was a complete obsession. You remember, Dad? In the exhibit it said he sent out a huge expedition in search of some fabled islands in the Pacific, the Isles of the Immortals. I asked whether you’d ever hunted for them.”
Costas had a faraway look in his eyes, and began humming the Hawaii-Five-Oh tune. “I think I know where they are.”
Rebecca’s face crumpled with frustration. “You’re not taking me seriously.”
Jack looked at the statue. “The Chinese concept of the afterlife was close to the notion of immortality. You didn’t go to heaven as we might understand it. Instead you remained in a kind of parallel universe, shadowing the real world. For the First Emperor of China, Shihuangdi, in the third century BC, the idea of heaven couldn’t offer him more than he already had on earth. That’s what the terracotta army was about, a copy of what he had at his command during his mortal life.”
Rebecca was silent, looking down and fiddling with her fingers. Aysha leaned forward and looked at her. “I know what you’re driving at. It’s the allure of the east, isn’t it? Do you think that’s what Howard was after, when he disappeared? For some, it was remote fantasy valleys, Shangri-la, lost kingdoms, heaven on earth, places where you could live forever in earthly paradise. For others, it was where you might find the secret of immortality. Always it was the allure of eternal life, the greatest of treasures.”
“But what about our Roman legionaries?” Costas said. “Is this what they were after too? I thought all they wanted was glorious death, to join their brothers-in-arms in Elysium.”
“Out there, on the Silk Route heading east, they may have thought they were in that shadowland already, marching alongside their dead companions,” Jack said. “But they were still alive, and we should never underestimate human desire. For those among them who still hankered after it, immortality might have seemed their only hope of ever making it back to Rome.”
“How could they have known what lay ahead?” Aysha murmured. “What might have drawn them on?”
“I was getting to that,” Rebecca said. “The First Emperor’s tomb was at the end of the Silk Route, right? Full of treasure, just as it is today. If traders coming down from the Silk Route could tell the author of the Periplus about legionaries escaping from Parthia and heading east, then traders could also have told the legionaries about the fabled tomb of the First Emperor. Maybe a trader told them the story in the hope they’d spare his life.”
“Maybe we’re being too mystical about this,” Costas said, rubbing his stubble.
“What do you mean?” Rebecca said.
“Maybe you have the right idea, but it wasn’t some mystical allure. Just good old-fashioned treasure.”
“Dad says you’re wrong about him, he’s an archaeologist, not a treasure hunter.”
“When I see an elephant, I call it an elephant.” Costas stood up. “We need to get to the Zodiac. And I wasn’t being flippant. Hawaii is paradise. The west shore of Kaua’i, you know? There’s a beautiful beach with some shady palms just beyond Hanalei, and the perfect little bar.”
“Dad says you’re a beach bum,” Rebecca said.
“Now you know why I have to go.�
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Jack turned to Rebecca. “Keep on reading John Howard’s diary. There might be more in it I’ve missed. And pretty good thinking, by the way. We might just sign you up. All you have to do now is learn to dive.”
“It’s a done deal, Jack,” Costas said. “I’m taking her out from Kaua’i next week.”
“She might not want to, of course,” Jack said. “She might want to learn to fly helicopters instead.”
“Oh, I’ll do anything for Uncle Costas,” Rebecca said, waving a diving textbook at them as she followed Hiebermeyer and Aysha out of the door.
Jack turned to Costas, his expression serious. “I’m dog-tired, but I’m looking forward to this.” He jerked his head toward the pile of khaki clothes and jungle boots beside his bed. A shoulder strap and holster lay on top, the butt of his Beretta 92 automatic poking out. “It’s been a while since I’ve worn that.”
“Too long, Jack. We don’t want to lose the edge.”
Jack was suddenly exhilarated. It had been an extraordinary twenty-four hours since he had first seen the shards with the text of the Periplus, and he was still reeling. They had begun to fathom out a story from the past, a lattice of possibilities and connections. Already he had begun to see images, the first few pictures in his mind that told him his instincts were right. Gnarled, weatherbeaten faces—Roman faces—the sheen of sunlight off a blood-soaked blade, swirling snow, then something else, the image of a warrior, something he could not shake from his mind. He turned and looked at the pictures above the sea chest, the faded images of the British officer, of his wife and child. Jack felt as if he were about to walk into that image and join his ancestor on his foray into the darkness, to a place Jack had yearned to know all his adult life. He took a deep breath, picked up the holster and looked at Costas. “Good to go?”
“Good to go.”
Godavari River, India, 20 August 1879
LIEUTENANT JOHN HOWARD, ROYAL ENGINEERS, TOOK off his pith helmet and wiped his brow. The sun was bearing down directly on the deck of the steamer now, and it was deuced hot. The brass helmet plate of the Queen’s Own Madras Sappers and Miners gleamed up at him, lovingly polished by his batman that morning. But it presented an excellent mark for a sharpshooter, and he rubbed his grimy palm into it, and then replaced the helmet on his head. He reached out to touch the metal casing of the paddlewheel, the last spot of shade along the side of the vessel, but the metal was like a furnace. A lump of coal rolled out from under an oilskin in front of him and he kicked it despondently. At least they had managed to get that dry. He had seen speckles of iron pyrites in the coal, and had remembered an alarming demonstration of spontaneous combustion in damp coal at the School of Military Engineering. It would have been a less than glorious end to his first field command, immolated on a sandbar in a godforsaken river gorge in the jungle of eastern India, without ever having fired a shot. He was beginning to realize that war was like that.
The Tiger Warrior Page 10